Neil Arthur has had a prolific six years since he got his chart-breaking synth pop band Blancmange back together after twenty-five years away in 2011. While his band mate Stephen Luscombe dropped out again soon after the release of their comeback fourth album 'Blanc Burn' (2011) as a result of ill-health, Arthur has gone on to release another two Blancmange vocal albums, 'Semi Detached' (2915) and 'Commuter 23' (2016); an instrumental album 'Nil by Mouth' (2015), and has also fronted several tours.

The next few months will be a particularly busy period for the workaholic Arthur. Blancmange's early trio of albums, 'Happy Families' (1982), 'Mange Tout' (1984) and 'Believe You Me' (1985), are all being reissued on Arthur's Blanc Burn label in triple CD versions in August, and the group's eighth album 'Unfurnished Rooms' will come out in September.

Then there is Fader, Arthur's new side project, which also has a new album 'First Light' just out. A collaboration between Arthur, who has worked on vocals and lyrics, and electronic experimental musician Benge, who has released several solo albums and is also a member of John Foxx And The Maths and here provides all the instrumentation, they have with 'First Light' created an album of stark, abstract beauty.

Benge's minimalist synth lines have an element of an early David Cronenberg film soundtrack or that of Sound offshoot Second Layer's unsettlingly powerful 1981 only album, 'World of Rubber'. There has always been a bleakness and sense of claustrophobia to much of Neil Arthur's songwriting, even on early seemingly upbeat chart hits such as 'Waves' and 'Blind Vision', and here with Fader it reaches a new peak.

Spiralling, stabbing instrumentation combines with a nerve-wracked, angst-laden vocal from Arthur on 'Check the Power' to tell of paranoia and mental self-immobilization (Is the door locked?/Is the door locked?/You got to/You got to go back/Better go back"). 'I Prefer Solitude' is the most poppy track on 'First Light' with an anthemic chorus line and surging synths, but its narrator's proclamation of his need for solitude has come at a harsh price and is possibly a lie ("Now I'm living/Living without you/Now I'm living/Living despite you/I said "I will do"/Don't mean it's true/I've never been lonely/I prefer solitude").

"Guilt doubt and fear/When you're near" bellows Arthur on the turbulent 'Guilt Doubt and Fear'. The mournful, elegiac 'A Trip to the Coast' meanwhile tells of a couple's trip to the beach where something has irretrievably broken down between them ("Life turns out this way/In unfair weather/More than hats are lost/Fortunes unfold"). In the final track 'Laundrette', Arthur has written one of the most evocative lyrics of his strong career as he tells, amidst a backdrop of Benge's eerie, ebbing synths. of two people - one is not sure whether they are ex-lovers or one-time friends - who meet for the first time in years in a laundrette but then choose to blank each other ("In the laundrette/On Nelson Street/After years of nothing/We finally meet/In silence and silver").

Fader have created a lot with both sparse instrumentation and lyrics out of a little on 'First Light', and have caught on it much of the angst and alienation of contemporary times.